1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to content query mechanisms for use with digital content-laden material, and more particularly to methods of constructing and executing queries directed at digital materials containing, or associated with, MPEG-7 content descriptions.
2. Description of the Background Art
Vast quantities of content are currently available within private and public databases, with internet-based content aggregation and distribution being a highly visible segment of Internet commerce. Systems and applications capable of searching through content databases, however, have been largely confined to finding textually based resources. The selection of multimedia content from a database generally remains difficult, inaccurate, and highly laborious. It will be appreciated that searching for multimedia content within a large repository has largely outpaced the ability of current query and searching tools. Presently, a party searching for content to meet a set of selection criterion is often required to load and manually check objects against the selection criterion.
Recently, however, standards have begun to emerge for characterizing various multimedia sources. The MPEG-7 standard is one such standard that provides a substantially uniform set of metrics for identifying characteristics of a digital source, in particular multimedia sources. A working group of ISO/IEC referred to as the Moving Pictures Expert Group has created a content description system known as MPEG-7. The new MPEG-7 standard provides a content description standard, which should not be confused with multimedia representation standards, such as MPEG-1, and MPEG-2. The MPEG-7 standard provides a universal and extensible set of content descriptions which utilize description schemes and descriptors to describe aspects of digital material objects including: format, size, type, encoding, basic structures, colors, textures, shapes, motion, speech annotations, timbre, melody, content related terms, syntactic structures, semantic structures, syntactic-semantic links, relationships, as well as a large set of additional content description metrics. FIG. 1 is an example of graphical color characterization, generally referred to as color histogramming, for an image whose colors are shown quantized into individual RGB components. The color information from the histogram is an example of information which may be included within an MPEG-7 content description. Although MPEG-7 may be utilized for characterizing multimedia content, there is an attendant lack of convenient methods and systems by which a user may search content resources associated with MPEG-7 descriptions.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and system which facilitates the selection of content, in particular forms of multimedia content, from within a database or network. The present system fulfills that need, as well as others, while being organized to ease implementation within the present network infrastructure and to overcome deficiencies in previously developed mechanisms for selecting content.